Halloween Bingo 2020: TA’s Game Preparation Post

Note

When updating this post during the game, the books actually selected will be highlighted in bold print and with a check mark (√) next to them.

Updates

Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora — STONE COLD HORROR replaced by READ BY FLASHLIGHT OR CANDLELIGHT

Also, as our game hosts have made it clear that (like in most previous years) the center square won’t be called (but rather, can be claimed as soon as we’ve read a book for it), I’ll be adding a fourth marker for that square (read = called), featuring Charlie’s brother Sunny!

 

The Card

My Markers

Read             Called                   Read & Called   Read = Called

 

The Spell Pack

Authors (and books) possibly to be used with Amplification Spell:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter, Kissing the Witch
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Wild Card Author:
Agatha Christie

Possible squares for Bingo Flip and / or Transfiguration Spell:

Bingo Flip:
  
Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora –“Stone Cold Horror” replaced by “Read by Flashlight or Candlelight”.

 

The Squares

SLEEPY HOLLOW
Most likely:
Alice Hoffman: The River King √

Alternatives:
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Talisman
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript, School Days, Chance, Hush Money, Small Vices
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand

 

FILM AT 11
Most likely:
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice √

or: Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped

Alternatives:
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Raymond Chandler: The Little Sister
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse, Curtain, Halloween Party
Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap
Michael Crichton: The Great Train Robbery
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
T.S. Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Craig Johnson: The Cold Dish
Stephen King: Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Talisman
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
Philip MacDonald: The List of Adrian Messenger
Mario Puzo: The Godfather
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Richard III
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost

 

SOUTHERN GOTHIC
Most likely:
Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley √

Alternatives:
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Various Authors: New Orleans Noir

 

MURDER MOST FOUL
Most likely:
Michael Connelly: The Night Fire √

or: Jason Goodwin: The Janissary Tree
or: Anna Katharine Green: The Leavenworth Case
Oo. Robert van Gulik: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
or: Margaret Millar: The Listening Walls

Alternatives:
Gary Corby: The Ionia Sanction
Deborah Crombie: Dreaming of the Bones
Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Setting Scores or The Measure of Malice (British Library Crime Classics anthologies)
Ian Fleming: Goldfinger or Moonraker
Graham Greene: The Confidential Agent
Ellen Kushner: Swordspoint
Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise, The Golden Egg, Friends in High Places, or Fatal Remedies
Mystery Writers of America Presents: Odd Partners
George Pelecanos: Hard Revolution
Otto Penzler (ed.), Various Authors: The Big Book of Female Detectives
Ian Rankin: Rebus Audio Box Set 1
Ruth Rendell: Some Lie and Some Die, A Demon in My View, Thirteen Steps Down, Harm Done, A Sight for Sore Eyes, End in Tears, Simisola, Road Rage, A Dark Blue Perfume and Other Stories, An Unkindness of Ravens, Shake Hands Forever, A Guilty Thing Surprised, or The Speaker of Mandarin
J.D. Robb: Naked in Death
Georges Simenon: Maigret: Die spannendsten Fälle
Various Authors: Classic Crime Short Stories (audio collection)
Various Authors: Classic Railway Murders (audio collection)

… or any of the murder mysteries listed as options for other squares on my card.

 

SPELLBOUND
Most likely:
Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver √

Alternatives:
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Emma Donoghue: Kissing the Witch
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Stephen Fry: Heroes
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Tessa Gratton: The Queens of Innis Lear
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Stephen King: Carrie, The Talisman
Katherine Kurtz: Deryni Rising
Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonsong
Alexander McCall Smith (ed.): The Girl Who Married a Lion (African Folk Tales)
Vonda N. McIntyre: Dreamsnake
Christopher Paolini: Inheritance
Terry Pratchett: Jingo, Maskerade, Small Gods, BBC Dramatizatons (Mort, Wyrd Sisters, Guards! Guards!, Eric, Small Gods, Night Watch)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter books
William Shakespeare: Macbeth
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Judith Tarr: Alamut, The Isle of Glass
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin, Tales from the Perilous Realm
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Various Authors: Magicats
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden

 

INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF MYSTERY
Most likely:
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable √

Alternatives:
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace, The Robber Bride
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter, Kissing the Witch
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty
Tana French: Broken Harbour
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Barbara Nadel: Land of the Blind
Edna O’Brien: House of Splendid Isolation, The Little Red Chairs
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

 

TERROR IN A SMALL TOWN
Most likely:
Michael Jecks: The Malice of Unnatural Death √

or: Ann Cleeves: Red Bones
or: Peter Grainger: Songbird or But for the Grace
or: Cyril Hare: Death Walks the Woods or Untimely Death
or: Michael Jecks: The Templar’s Penance, The Mad Monk of Gidleigh, The Chapel of Bones, or The Butcher of St. Peter’s

Alternatives:
Rennie Airth: River of Darkness
Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace
Simon Beaufort: Deadly Inheritance
Francis Beeding: Death Walks in Eastrepps
E.C. Bentley: Trent’s Own Case
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Carol Carnac: Crossed Skies
John Dickson Carr: Castle Skull
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse, Curtain, Halloween Party
Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Matthew Costello, Neil Richards: Cherringham
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edmund Crispin: The Case of the Gilded Fly
Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery
Tana French: Broken Harbour
Elizabeth George: A Place of Hiding, Careless in Red, This Body of Death
Anthony Gilbert: Death in a Fancy Dress
Friedrich Glauser: Wachtmeister Studer
J.M. Gregson: Murder at the Nineteenth
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Reginald Hill: A Clubbable Woman
Alice Hoffman: The River King
Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
P.D. James: Unnatural Causes, Devices and Desires
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Craig Johnson: The Cold Dish
Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice
Mary Kelly: The Spoilt Kill
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie
Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: A Murder of Quality
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
E.C.R. Lorac: Murder in the Mill-Race, Fire in the Thatch
Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Michael McGarrity: Tularosa
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor
Gil North: The Methods of Sergeant Cluff
Edna O’Brien: House of Splendid Isolation, The Little Red Chairs
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Joyce Porter: Dover One
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town
Ruth Rendell: A New Lease of Death
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Peter Robinson: Gallows View, Wednesday’s Child
Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind
James Runcie: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River (?)
Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Julian Symons: The Colour of Murder, The Players and the Game, The Plot Against Roger Rider
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
Various Authors: Magicats
Various Authors: Feline Felonies
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road
T.H. White: Darkness at Pemberley
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost

 

TRULY TERRIFYING
Most likely:
Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare √

Alternatives:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Humphrey Carpenter: The Inklings
John Curran: Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making
Judith Flanders: The Invention of Murder
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Neil Gaiman: The View from the Cheap Seats
Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias and Their Enemies
Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm
Ulrich Lampen (ed.): Die NS-Führung im Verhör
Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight
Terry Pratchett: A Slip of the Keyboard
Friedrich Reck-Malleczwewen: Tagebuch eines Verzeifelten
Philippe Sands: East West Street
Julian Symons: The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe
Bob Woodward: The Last of the President’s Men, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat

 

AMATEUR SLEUTH
Most likely:
Anthony Gilbert: Death in Fancy Dress √

or: Philip Gooden: The Salisbury Manuscript
or: Mary Kelly: The Spoilt Kill
or: Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind

Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker, Coroner’s Pidgin
Simon Beaufort: Deadly Inheritance
Lauren Belfer: City of Light
E.C. Bentley: Trent’s Own Case
Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder, The Beast Must Die
Jan Burke: Eighteen
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, Castle Skull
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow
Michael Connelly: Fair Warning
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Edmund Crispin: The Case of the Gilded Fly
Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector, The Cold Moon
Francis Durbridge: Paul Temple
Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery
R. Austin Freeman: The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke, The Cat’s Eye
Jacques Futrelle: The Thinking Machine at Work
Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton
Elizabeth George: A Place of Hiding
Michael Gilbert: Death in Captivity
Robert Goddard: Sea Change
Sue Grafton: A Is for Alibi
Cyril Hare: Death Walks the Woods, Untimely Death
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Laura Lippman: By a Spider’s Thread
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript, School Days, Burt Reynods Reads: Chance / Hush Money / Small Vices
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town, The Chinese Orange Mystery
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Clayton Rawson: The Great Merlini
Candace Robb: The Riddle of St. Leonards’
Gillian Roberts: Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
James Runcie: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Frank Schätzing: Tod und Teufel
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
Jay Stringer: Ways to Die in Glasgow
Barbara Vine: Asta’s Book
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road

 

RELICS AND CURIOSITIES
Most likely:
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies √

Alternatives:
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty (?)
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Philip Gooden: The Salisbury Manuscript
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Stephen King: The Talisman
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
Robin McKinley: The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword
Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Christopher Paolini: Inheritance
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter books
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

GENRE: HORROR
Most likely:
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White √

or: Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven & Annabelle Lee

Alternatives:
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Agatha Christie: Endless Night
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Long Walk, The Talisman
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE
Most likely:
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million √

Alternatives:
Ben Elton: Identity Crisis
Stephen King: The Long Walk, The Talisman
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Ian Rankin: Westwind
James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

 

CENTER (RAVEN) SQUARE
Read: Agatha Christie: The Thirteen Problems √

 

 

 

 

 

FULL MOON
Most likely:
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight √
or: Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor

Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick (?)
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales (?)
Jeffery Deaver: The Cold Moon
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke

 

THIRTEEN
Most likely:
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker √
or: Terry Pratchett: Small Gods

 

 

 

 

  

Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora — STONE COLD HORROR replaced by READ BY FLASHLIGHT OR CANDLELIGHT

Read: Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho √

Ugh. I’m going to have to give this one some further thought — currently it’s looking like a candidate for the application of one of my spell cards.

(This is going to be was a spur-of-the-moment selection … it’s not like my book pool (of everything BUT horror) is in danger of running low, after all!

 

PSYCH
Most likely:
Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die √

or: Vera Caspary: Laura
or: C.S. Forester: Payment Deferred or Plain Murder
or: Tana French: Broken Harbour
or: Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground
or Michael Jecks: The Chapel of Bones or The Mad Monk of Gidleigh
or: Donna Tartt: The Secret History

Alternatives:
Charles Warren Adams: The Notting Hill Mystery
Rennie Airth: River of Darkness
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace, The Robber Bride
Francis Beeding: Death Walks in Eastrepps
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
Jay Bonansinga: The Sleep Police
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, Castle Skull
Jane Casey: The Burning
Agatha Christie: Endless Night
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Michael Connelly: Fair Warning
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector, The Cold Moon
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty
Joy Ellis: They Disappeared
Ben Elton: Identity Crisis, The First Casualty
Hugh Fraser: Harm
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Elizabeth George: What Came Before He Shot her, This Body of Death, Believing the Lie
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Cyril Hare: Untimely Death
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Alice Hoffman: The River King
Roy Horniman: Kind Hearts and Coronets (aka Israel Rank)
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
Richard Hull: Excellent Intentions
P.D. James: Unnatural Causes, Devices and Desires, A Certain Justice
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Carrie, The Talisman
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Tailor of Panama, Our Kind of Traitor
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
James MacManus: Black Venus
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent
Vonda N. McIntyre: Dreamsnake
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man
Margaret Millar: An Air That Kills, Beast in View
Jo Nesbø: Macbeth
Anne Perry: Seven Dials, Southampton Row
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Julian Symons: The Colour of Murder, The Players and the Game, The Plot Against Roger Rider
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
C.J. Tudor: The Taking of Annie Thorne
Various Authors: Helsinki Noir
Various Authors: Los Angeles Noir
Various Authors: New Orleans Noir
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, Asta’s Book, A Dark-Adapted Eye
Minette Walters: Disordered Minds
Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road
Mary Westmacott: Giant’s Bread, The Burden
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

 

DOOMSDAY
Most likely:
A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok √

Alternatives:
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Stephen King: The Long Walk, The Talisman
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Ian Rankin: Westwind
Candace Robb: The Riddle of St. Leonards’
James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Catherynne M. Valente: Space Opera
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden

 

BLACK CAT
Most likely:
T.S. Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats √

Alternatives:
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General (?)
Stephen King: Pet Semetary
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Saki: Tobermory (?)
Various Authors: Magicats
Various Authors: Feline Felonies

 

DIVERSE VOICES
Most likely:
Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

Substitution:
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise √

Alternatives:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

 

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
Most likely:
Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt
Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories

Substitution:
Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor √

Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick (?)
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, The Hollow Man
Vera Caspary: Laura
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands (?)
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse
Ann Cleeves: Red Bones
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Michael Connelly: The Night Fire (?)
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
Jeffery Deaver: The Cold Moon
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
David Dodge: To Catch a Thief
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty (?)
Francis Durbridge: Send for Paul Temple
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s, The Mad Monk of Gidleigh
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Carrie
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: The Tailor of Panama
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight
Jo Nesbo: Macbeth
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven & Annabelle Lee
Terry Pratchett: Small Gods, BBC Dramatizatons (Mort, Wyrd Sisters, Guards! Guards!, Eric, Small Gods, Night Watch)
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (?)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River (?)
William Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Lear
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men, The Terror
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden

 

PAINT IT BLACK
Most likely:
James MacManus: Black Venus

Substitution:
Julie Smith (ed.) & Various Authors: New Orleans Noir √

Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker, Coroner’s Pidgin, Blackkerchief Dick
Vera Caspary: Laura
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Michael Connelly: The Black Echo
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Francis Durbridge: Send for Paul Temple
C.S. Forester: Payment Deferred
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Jacques Futrelle: The Thinking Machine at Work
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare
Taylor Jenkins Reid: Daisy Jones and the Six
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
George R.R. Martin (ed.), Various Authors: Dangerous Women
Mario Puzo: The Godfather
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses, Watchman
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Various Authors: Helsinki Noir
Various Authors: Los Angeles Noir
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
T.H. White: Darkness at Pemberley

 

NEW RELEASE
Most likely:
Joy Ellis: They Disappeared √

or: Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
or: Michael Connelly: Fair Warning

Alternative:
Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Setting Scores

 

 

GENRE: SUSPENSE
Most likely:
Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground √

or: Patricia Highsmith: Carol
or: John Lanchester: Fragrant Harbour
or: Derek B. Miller: Norwegian by Night

Alternatives:
Ken Follett: Eye of the Needle
Maurice LeBlanc: Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes
John Le Carré: A Perfect Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, The Honorable School Boy, Call for the Dead, The Secret Pilgrim, or Absolute Friends
Mary Westmacott: Unfinished Portrait or Absent in the Spring

… or virtually any and all of the mysteries, horror and fantasy books listed as options for the other squares on my card.

 

DARKEST LONDON
Most likely:
Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt √

or: Charles Warren Adams: The Notting Hill Mystery
or: Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests

Alternatives:
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder
Anthony Boucher: The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: Death Watch
Jane Casey: The Burning
Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse
Rory Clements: Martyr
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow
Michael Crichton: The Great Train Robbery
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter
Francis Durbridge: Paul Temple — Complete Radio Collection, Volume 1
Ken Follett: A Dangerous Fortune
C.S. Forester: Plain Murder
Andrew Forrester: The Female Detective
R. Austin Freeman: The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke, The Cat’s Eye
Robert Goddard: Sea Change
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
P.D. James: A Certain Justice
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
Arthur Morrison: Martin Hewitt, Investigator; Detective Stories
John Mortimer: Rumpole and the Reign of Terror
Anne Perry: Seven Dials, Southampton Row, A Sudden Fearful Death
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Christopher Priest: The Prestige
Ruth Rendell: Portobello
John Rhode: The Paddington Mystery
Stella Rimington: Dead Line
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, Asta’s Book
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men, The Terror
Oscar Wilde: Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

2020 Mid-Year Reading Review and Statistics

What with the pandemic still very much ongoing, BL acting up again, MR’s and Char’s resulting posts re: BookLikes, the BL experience, and moving back to Goodreads, this feels like a somewhat odd moment to post my half-yearly reading stats.  I hope it won’t be the last time on this site, but I fear that the community to which I’ve belonged for almost a decade — longer than to any other online community — and which, most recently, has played a pivotal role in making the Corona pandemic more bearable to me, is on the point of breaking up.  And frankly, this is making me incredibly sad.

Book-wise, too, the pandemic has had a huge impact on my reading; for three out of the past six months, I pretty much exclusively withdrew into Golden Age mystery comfort reads, because I just didn’t have it in me to tackle anything else.  Though I suppose in comparison with others, who went into more or less full-fledged reading slumps, I can still color myself lucky.

That said, the past six months’ reading highlights definitely included all of the buddy reads, both for the shared reading experience and for the books themselves — as well as a number of books that I read either before the pandemic began or in the very recent couple of weeks … though I’m tempted to list every single favorite Golden Age mystery that I reread during the pandemic, too; in addition to a whole number of new discoveries.  So, without further ado (and roughly in reverse chronological order):

 

Highlights:

The Buddy Reads:

Jean-François Parot: L’énigme des blancs-manteaux (The Châtelet Apprentice)
The first of Parot’s Nicolas le Floch historical mysteries set in 18th century Paris.  Nicolas is a Breton by birth and, on the recommendation of his godfather, a Breton nobleman, joins the Paris police force under the command of its (real) Lieutenant General Antoine de Sartine, one of the late 18th century’s most influential statesmen and administrators. —  Parot was an expert on the period and a native Parisian, both of which elements clearly show in his writing, and I’m already looking forward to reading more books from the series.

French-language buddy read with Tannat and onnurtilraun — we’re now also looking into the possibly of “buddy-watching” the (French) TV adaptation starring Jérôme Robart.

The pandemic buddy reads; including and in particular:
* Josephine Tey: A Daughter of Time (with BT’s and my individual add-on, Tey’s play Dickon, written under the name Gordon Daviot, which likewise aims at setting the record straight vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s Richard III) — A Daughter of Time was a reread; Dickon was new to me.
* Georgette Heyer: No Wind of Blame (the first of the Inspector Hemingway mysteries — also a reread);
* Agatha Christie: Towards Zero and Cat Among the Pigeons (both likewise rereads);
* Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice (also a reread; one of my favorite Inspector Alleyn mysteries);
* Cyril Hare: Tenant for Death (the first Inspector Mallett mystery — new to me);
* Patricia Wentworth: The Case Is Closed (Miss Sliver book #2 — also new to me; this isn’t a series I am reading in publication order).

Dorothy Dunnett: The Game of Kings (book 1 of the Lymond Chronicles)
16th century Scotland; the adventures of a main character somewhere between Rob Roy, Robin Hood and Scaramouche (mostly Scaramouche), but it also features a range of strong and altogether amazing female characters.  Another series I’m looking forward to continuing.

The first buddy read of the year, together with Moonlight Reader, BrokenTune, and Lillelara.

 

My Individual Highlights:

Bernardine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other
Heaven knows the Booker jury doesn’t always get it right IMHO, but wow, this time for once they absolutely did.  If you haven’t already read this, run, don’t walk to get it.  And though initially I was going to say “especially if you’re a woman (and from a minority)” — no, I’m actually going to make that, “especially if you’re a white man”.

Saša Stanišić: Herkunft (Origin) and Gaël Faye: Petit pays (Small Country)
Two autobiographical books dealing with the authors’ genocide experience, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Burundi, respectively. Stanišić’s account — an odd mix of fact on fiction, which does lean pretty strongly towards the factual, however — asks, as the title indicates, how precisely our geographical, ethnic and cultural origin / sense of “belonging” defines our identity; and it focuses chiefly on the refugee experience and the experience of creating a new place for oneself in a new (and substantially different) country and culture.  Faye’s short novel (barely longer than a novella) packs an equal amount of punch, but approaches the topic from the other end — it’s a coming of age tale looking at the way our cultural identity is first drummed into us … and how ethnic stereotypes and hostilities, when fanned and exploited, will almost invariably lead to war and genocide.

 

Josephine Tey: The Inspector Grant series, Dickon, and Miss Pym Disposes
Having already read two books from Tey’s Alan Grant series (The Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair) as well as her nonseries novel Brat Farrar in past years, and Miss Pym Disposes at the beginning of this year, I took the combined (re)read of The Daughter of Time and the play Dickon during the pandemic buddy reads (see above) as my cue to finally also read the rest of the Inspector Grant mysteries.  And I’m glad I finally did; Tey’s work as a whole is a paean to her much-beloved England — and though she was Scottish by birth, to a somewhat lesser degree also to Scotland –; a love that would eventually cause her to bequeath her entire estate to the National Trust. — Though the books are ostensibly mysteries, the actual “mystery” element almost takes a back seat to the land … and to its people, or rather to people like those who formed Tey’s personal circle of friends and acquaintances.  And it is in creating characters that her writing shines as much as in the description of England’s and Scotland’s natural beauty.

Pete Brown: Shakespeare’s Local
Another book that I owned way too long before I finally got around to reading it; the discursive — in the best sense –, rollicking tale of one London (or rather, Southwark) pub from its earliest days in the Middle Ages to the 21st century, telling the history of Southwark, London, public houses, and their patrons along the way.  The title is glorious conjecture and based on little more than the fact that the pub is near the location of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (combined with the equally demonstrable fact that Shakespeare loved a good ale and what today we’d call a pub crawl) … so it’s highly likely that, like many another celebrity over the centuries, he’d have had the occasional pint at this particular inn, the George, as well.

Dorothy L. Sayers: Love All
A delightful drawing room comedy that was, owing to its completion during WWII, only performed twice during Sayers’s own lifetime and never again thereafter, which is utterly unfair to both the material and its author — topically, this is the firmly tongue in cheek stage companion to such works as Gaudy Night and the two speeches republished under the title Are Women Human?  (I’d call it feminist if Sayers hadn’t hated that term, but whatever label you want to stick on it, its message comes through loud and clear and with plenty of laughs.)

Christianna Brand: Green for Danger
One of the discoveries of my foray into the realm of Golden Age mysteries; an eerie, claustrophobic, psychological drama revolving around several suspicious deaths (and near-deaths) at a wartime hospital in Kent during WWII.  None of Brand’s other mysteries that I’ve read so far is quite up to this level, but she excelled in closed-circle settings featuring a small group of people who all genuinely like each other (and really are, for the most part, likeable from the reader’s — and the investigating policeman’s — perspective, too), and in this particular book, the backdrop of the added danger arising from the wartime setting adds even more to the tension.  It’s also fairly obvious that Brand was writing from personal experience, which greatly enhances every single aspect of the book, from the setting and the atmosphere to the individual characters.

Sonia Sotomayor: My Beloved World
Sotomayor’s memoirs up to her first appointment to the Federal Bench.  What a courageous woman!  A trailblazer in every sense of the word — a passionate advocate for women, Latinos/-as (not just Puerto Ricans), those hindered in their career path by a pre-existing medical condition (in her case: diabetes), and more generally, everybody up against unequal odds.  Fiercely intelligent and never satisfied with second best (for herself and others alike), she nevertheless comes across as eminently likeable and open-minded — on the list of people I’d like to meet one day (however unlikely), she shot right up to a top spot after I’d read this book; in close vicinity with Michelle Obama.

John Bercow: Unspeakable
Bercow’s time as Speaker of the House of Commons was doubtlessly among the more remarkable periods in the history of the British Parliament, both on account of his personality and of the momentous decisions taken during those years; and his unmistakeable style jumps out from every page of his memoir — as well as every minute of the audio edition, which he narrates himself.  The last chapter (his attempt at outlining the odds for Britain post-Brexit) was already obsolete before the Corona pandemic hit; this is even more true now.  However, the vast majority of the book makes for a fascinating read, not least of course because of his insight into the politics — and politicians — of his time (he is neither sparing with the carrot nor with the stick, and some of his reflections, e.g., on the qualities of a “good” politician / member of parliament, would constitute ample food for thought for politicians anywhere).

 

Statistics:

As I said above, the one thing that definitely had the biggest impact on my reading in the first six months of 2020 was my three-month long “comfort reading” retreat into the world of Golden Age mysteries.  So guess what:

Of the 129 books I read in the first six months of 2020, a whopping 63% were Golden Age and contemporary mysteries — add in the 10 historical mysteries that also form the single biggest chunk of my historical fiction reading, you even get to 91 books or 70.5%.

I am rather pleased, though, that — comfort and escape reading aside and largely thanks to a number of truly interesting memoirs and biographies — the number of nonfiction books is roughly equivalent to the sum of “high brow” fiction (classics and litfic).

Another thing that makes me happy is that my extended foray into Golden Age mysteries was not overwhelmingly limited to rereads; these accounted for only 28% of all books read (36 in absolute figures), a percentage which is not substantially higher than my average in the last two years.  At the same time, as a comparatively large number of Golden Age mysteries are not (yet?) available as audiobooks — not even all of those that have been republished in print in recent years –, and as I have spent considerably less time driving to and from meetings and conferences than in the past two years, the share of print books consumed is higher than it was in 2018 and 2019.

 

Given the high percentage of comfort reading, it’s no surprise that my star ratings are on the high side for the first half of 2020 — the vast majority of the books were decent, if not good or even great reads.

Overall average: 3.7 stars 

However, my Golden Age mystery binge also had a noticeable effect on the two statistics I’m tracking particularly: gender and ethnicity.

As far as gender is concerned things still look very good if you just focus on the authors: 88 books by women (plus 5 mixed anthologies / author teams) vs. 36 books by male authors; hooray!  However, inspired by onnurtilraun, I decided to add another layer this time and also track protagonists … and of course, if there is one genre where women authors have created a plethora of iconic male protagonists, it is Golden Age mystery fiction; and all the Miss Marples, Miss Silvers, Mrs. Bradleys and other female sleuths out there can’t totally wipe out the number of books starring the likes of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Roderick Alleyn, and other male detectives of note.  Then again, the Golden Age mystery novelists actually were ahead of their time in not only creating women sleuths acting independently but also in endowing their male detectives with equally strong female partners and friends, so the likes of Ariadne Oliver, Agatha “Troy” Alleyn, and of course the inimitable Harriet Vane, also make for a significantly higher number of books with both male and female protagonists.  Still, the gender shift is impossible to miss.

 

(For those wondering about the “N / A” protagonist, that’s Martha Wells’s Murderbot, who of course is an AI and deliberately created as gender-neutral.)

And of course, since there isn’t a non-white author to be found among the Golden Age mystery writers (or at least, none that I’m aware of and whose books figured as part of my reading during the past couple of months), the ethnicity chart goes completely out of the window.  Again, as long as you just look at the number of countries visited as part of my Around the World reading challenge (and if you ignore the number of books written by authors from / set in the UK and the U.S.), the figures actually still look pretty good — and yes, the relatively high number of European countries is deliberate; I mostly focused on authors from / settings in the Southern Hemisphere last year, so I figured since tracking ethnicity was substantially impacted by the mystery binge this year anyway, I might as well make a bit of headway with the European countries, too.

Yet, there is one interesting wrinkle even in the comparison of author vs. protagonist ethnicity; namely, where it comes to the non-Caucasian part of the table: It turns out that the number of non-white protagonists is slightly higher than that of non-white authors, because I managed to pick a few books at least which, though written by white authors, did feature non-white protagonists.  Make of that one what you will …

   

Nevertheless, for the rest of the year, the aim is clear … catch up on my Around the World reading challenge and build in as many books by non-Caucasian authors as possible!

Addendum
In a discussion on the BookLikes version of this post, the question came up whether the author’s gender and ethnicity matters at all, or whether the only thing that really matters is the quality of the writing to begin with.  Here’s what I wrote there:

I used to think it [= gender and ethnicity] didn’t / shouldn’t matter, too. Since I started to put greater weight on women’s writing and books by non-white authors, I’ve come to change my mind.

1) It’s not about “chromosomes”, but about life experience. Women, even in today’s society, experience life differently from men. That is true even for women who (like me) were raised — not necessarily deliberately, but as it were “by default” — in such a way as to embrace roles traditionally reserved for men from early childhood on (which incidentally frequently put me at odds with the boys in the playground), and who work in an industry that, even when I was in university, was still substantially dominated by (white) men, and to a certain extent still is even today (not in terms of access to the profession as such, but in terms of what is achievable and who calls the shots). And similarly, it is obvious that blacks, Latinos/-as, Asians, and members of other ethnicities experience society differently from whites — it didn’t take George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement to convince me of that.

So it is only natural that women — and non-white authors — also tell stories differently from men, and from white people, respectively. Not necessarily, perhaps not even overwhelmingly, the way that Bernadine Evaristo does — a book like “Girl, Women, Other” could of course never have been written by a man or by a white person to begin with. (And that’s precisely the reason why I said these are the people who most need to read this book — because it reflects a perspective that they / we will only ever be able to understand, if at all, intellectually; never instinctively and from personal experience.) Nor do I necessarily mean that male writing is more “testosterone-soaked” than women’s writing (though bad male writing almost invariably is), or that “men can’t write women characters” (and vice versa). — In most cases, the differences between men’s and women’s writing are so subtle that, as long as you don’t pay any attention, you don’t notice them at all. But if you come from reading a lot of books written by men (as I had, when I set out on this course a few years ago) and then you switch to reading books written mostly by women, you start noticing them after a while — in details of writerly focus, in little things like a detail of an individual characters’ response to a particular situation (or to somebody else’s comment), in the way dialogue is framed, in what matters to a character in a given situation, etc. Again, none of this rises to the level of “good / bad” “realistic / unrealistic” writing, or to “men writing women as men with XX.chromosomes” (or women writing men as women with XY-chromosomes, or whites writing other ethniticities as black-faced whites, etc.), but it’s there; and interestingly, it’s there as much in, say, Golden Age mystery fiction and other 19th and early 20th century classics as it is in contemporary writing.

2) It’s about industry access and noticeability. The publishing industry is, for all I can see, still way too much dominated by “pale stale males”. Like in my own industry (the law), it’s not so much a matter of a lack of women (or non-white) writers (and columnists, critics, journalists, etc.) But in the corporate structures, the old hierarchies die hard — not only at the top (= the tip of the iceberg) — and though I don’t know a lot of writers personally, I know enough to realize how much harder it is for women — and for writers of color — to obtain the same amount of exposure that a white male author would be able to obtain in their situation. (Again, this isn’t as simple as “good / bad writing” or a matter of talent — it’s about what it takes *in addition* to talent and good writing.) So if I can do my tiny little bit to help by actually buying and reading their books — and by occasionally even talking about those books, whenever I feel motivated enough to write a review, or by deliberately tracking my reading and talking about that, I’m more than happy to do that.

// TA steps off soap box.

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2804666/2020-mid-year-reading-statistics

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time & Dickon

This weekend’s “let’s-forget-the-pandemic” buddy read wasn’t the first time I read Josephine Tey’s setting-the-record-straight-about-Richard III novel, The Daughter of Time, but it was the first time that I did so by reading it together with her play on the same subject (written under the name Gordon Daviot), Dickon, and that combined reading changed my perspective on the novel yet again: not significantly, but in what I see as Tey’s impetus in writing it.

To begin with, maybe I should call Dickon “her other play” on the subject, as I think Sorry kids, no feet nailed it when she said in a comment on one of Tannat’s status updates that The Daughter of Time “read(s) like a play without actually being a play”.  It actually is a play, with only one stage setting — Grant’s hotel room –, deliberately confining him (who becomes the audience’s voice and brain) to that setting, depriving him of any and all other, and perhaps more conventional forms of entertainment right in the first chapter — not without a few wry sidelines on the state of the literary art and industry of the day –, and thus neatly focusing his, and hence the reader’s, attention on that one single thing remaining and apt enough to tease his brain: an investigation into an unsolved mystery of the past.  And of course, that hoary old chestnut, the fate of “the Princes in the Tower”, will never do — the investigation soon takes a completely different direction when Grant decides (very much like Ms. Tey herself, obviously) that Richard III’s face and his reputation simply don’t synch, and just how his name ended up on the list of history’s greatest villains must thus urgently be looked into (and set right).

Dubious, overrated, and dated starting point (“face reading”) aside, the real importance of Tey’s book lies, of course, in the profound shattering of the reputation that Richard III had had until then, ever since he lost his life at Bosworth and the Tudors had the control of what history would eventually make of the reign of the last York Plantagenet king.  There had been previous attempts to set the record straight both in the 18th and the 19th century, but it arguably took Tey’s deliberate choice of presenting the issue in the guise of a (well-researched) mass-marketed novel, in tandem with a stage play, to bring so much public attention to the matter that even well-known historic scholars could no longer ignore it — and the debate has been alive and well ever since.  (Even the presentation at the Bosworth visitor center is now painstakingly neutral in its overall approach, though some of the exhibit’s texts still clearly betray an anti-Ricardian bias.)

In The Daughter of Time, Tey presents the Tudors’ campaign of blackening Richard III’s name as only one, though a particularly grivous example of what she calls Tonypandy, for the town that was the focal point of the 1910-11 Welsh Miners’ strike, and which has since become a subject of a similarly furious historic dispute: to Tey, “Tonypandy” is a summary term signifying any and all instances of falsified historic and political propaganda.  Yet, as her play Dickon shows, it’s ultimately not “Tonypandy” at large that she is interested in but very much Richard III himself, in whom (and in whose features) she takes an enormous interest, reflected in Grant’s comments and thoughts on his portrait in The Daughter of Time, as much as in her own passionate advocacy, both in the play and in the novel.

In fact, the play neatly distills the “Dickon” content of the novel down to its essentials and presents the events in question in their own, proper historical setting; refuting — scene by scene — Shakespeare’s portrayal of the same events in his Richard III (or Tudor propaganda Exhibit A, as Tey saw it). And in one, perhaps the most endearing scene of the play, she has her Richard III do exactly what she expected of historians, and what Grant’s American “woolly lamb” research assistant does in the novel: Tease out the minutiae of daily life from the records left behind; obtain your information straight from the source, instead of relying on hearsay accounts written only after the fact.  “All the stuff of Middleham is here.  All that I have missed”, Richard tells his wife Anne when she wonders how he can possibly be so fascinated with their Yorkshire home’s account books, even though she faithfully reports on everything that is going on while he is in London with his brother, the King.  “But you don’t tell me that Betsy has been shod, that there is a new lock on the little east gate, that the dairy window was broken, that Kemp has had a boil on his neck,” he answers.  “That is Middleham.  If I cannot live it, I can at least look at the picture.”

Some of the things that Tey considered Tudor propaganda have since been proven true; e.g., the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton in that infamous Leicester parking lot has revealed that he really did have a spinal deformity and would thus have presented as a hunchback — so the Tudors didn’t need to lie about everything; they could also exploit features that their contemporaries would have been familiar with.  And other things, we will probably never know — personally I doubt whether, even if the remains of the “Princes in the Tower” were now found, too (against all odds), centuries after their disappearance, that discovery would do much to clarify who engineered their disappearance and apparent murder (unless other instances would throw additional light on the issue at the same time).  But ultimately this is about more than the fates of Edward IV’s sons; it’s about truth in the historical record, about unbiased research, and about the value of primary (= direct) vs. secondary (= indirect) evidence / hearsay.

And whereas a reader interested in the period now may come to her (play-disguised-as-a-)novel (and her (other) play) with quite a different perspective on Richard III, his victorious rival Henry VII, and the period as such, the splash that her writing made upon its first publication can still be heard to this day.  For that in and of itself, her decision to take the issue out of the academic debate and into the realm of popular fiction can’t be applauded loudly enough.

Bosworth: the battlefield today.

The Leicester parking lot where Richard III’s remains were found.

Commemorative / explanatory plaque on a wall near the parking lot gates …

… and an out-take of the above image: Richard III’s skeleton

The parking lot is down a narrow alley from Leiceseter Cathedral

The Tomb in Leicester Cathedral

The gold-decorated chancel of Leicester Cathedral right behind the altar, where Richard’s tomb is located

The coffin in which Richard’s bones were carried into the cathedral for reburial (the cloth is hand-embroidered)

Tower of London: The round building center/left is the Bloody Tower, where King Edward IV’s sons, today known simply as “the Princes in the Tower,” are believed to have been held.

  
Bloody Tower: Exhibition on the disappearance of “the Princes in the Tower.”
(All photos mine.)

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2429859/dickon

Cyril Hare: Tenant for Death

Well, it turns out RL kept me busy for much longer yesterday than I’d anticipated, so I really only got back to this book today.

That said, I truly enjoyed it — even the fact that the murderer turned out to be the most obvious suspect, in the end, didn’t bother me half as much as it had in An English Murder.  I also like the fact that Hare lets the murderer choose his own destiny — he is a likeable enough person; and clearly, though his motive doesn’t justify taking the law into his own hands, it is more than understandable, and arguably the victim was actually by far the greater villain.

The more books I read by Hare, the more I find I’m coming to him less for a fiendishly-constructed mystery — none of the three books I’ve read so far was exactly that — but for his wry humor and incisive observation of people and society.  As it does for Mike, his technique of cutting from one scene to another, chapter by chapter, works well for me; much better than a linear narrative.  I (too) could have done with some of the two investigators’ speculations on motive, means and opportunity — particularly at a moment where, as a reader, you had to have been sleepwalking through the book not to have clued in to the solution, at least in its very broad outlines — but by and large, this was yet another enjoyable read, and I’m definitely looking forward to continuing to explore Hare’s fiction.

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2376005/reading-progress-update-i-ve-read-100

Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice

Et in Arcadia ego.

Scales of Justice is a book from the middle segment of Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series and a superb example of the “serpent [even] in Paradise” type of Golden Age mysteries.  Marsh goes to great lengths to establish the book’s seemingly idyllic rural setting, beginning with its name, Swevenings (which we learn translates as “dream(s)”), and introducing us to it through the eyes of the village nurse, who looks down on the village from a nearby hill and imagines it as a picture map, which she eventually really does persuade someone to draw for her, and which the book’s print editions duly supply in turn.

Yet, we very soon learn that all is not well in the Garden of Eden, and what superficially only seems like a petty squabble among neighbors, such as they may occur in any village, soon turns out to be a harbinger of much greater evil.  It doesn’t take long to emerge that when the local squire — a retired, formerly high-ranking diplomat — dies (of natural causes), with what seems like a version of Pascal’s wager and the word “Vic” on his lips, he is not, after all, belatedly asking for the local vicar to be called to administer the Last Rites.  And by the time a murder does occur not too much later, the village air is brimming with suspects and motives aplenty.

But to me, the book’s real significance doesn’t lie in its reprisal of one of the Golden Age mystery formulas successfully established in the interwar years as such (“et in Arcadia ego”), complete with rural charms and plenty of quirky characters (and cats!), but, rather, in what it has to say about that Britain in the years immediately prior to WWII — and when it says so.  Scales of Justice was first published in 1955, just about a decade after the end of WWII; at a time when most of the world, and certainly Britain (and of course Germany) was still reeling from the effects of the war, and people were anything but willing to confront the causes of that war and take a close look at their own societies in the years leading up to it.  (In fact, in Germany the 1950s are now infamous for having produced a whole barrage of overly idyllic, kitsch as kitsch can movies dripping with the cloying, simplistic sweetness of clichéd romance and perfect Alpine scenery straight from the front cover of a high gloss travel brochure — all in response to the viewing public’s desire to blunt out the memory of the war years and evade any reflection on how the Nazi regime and the catastrophe it wrought could ever have happened in the first place.)  And while today we take it as a given that the Blackshirts and their ilk are a proper topic for discussion, in books and otherwise, I don’t get the sense that this was a given in 1950s’ fiction, particularly not in (ostensibly light) genre fiction such as this.  Yet, here the topic is front and center: kudos to Ms. Marsh for having the guts to give it this sort of exposure at the time when she chose to do so, and also for not falling into the trap of an overly convenient solution to the mystery into the bargain.

Linguistically and as far as the characters are concerned, too, this is Marsh at the top of her game: Her (professionally trained) painter’s eye makes it easy for her to create the Swevenings setting in the eyes of her readers’ minds in turn, and her ear for dialogue and experience as a director on the classical (Shakespearean) stage allows her to establish character with just a few well-crafted strokes of her writer’s pen.  The book’s imagery, from the setting, names (“Edie Puss” indeed …), and the titular double-entendre (which is expressly referenced in the book) to the cunning old trout that seems to be at the heart of so much of the village squabble is always spot-on and frequently tongue in cheek.  Alleyn — for once only accompanied by Inspector (“Br’er”) Fox, not also by his wife, painter Agatha Troy — is in fine form and, thanks to his customary focus on the physical evidence and the timeline of events, quickly able to distinguish the material and the immaterial.  My favorite characters are, of course, the representatives of the local feline element; in particular one Ms. Thomasina Twitchett.  The book is not burdened by any of Marsh’s shortcomings (such as anti-gay prejudice and a sorrowful lack of knowledge of organized crime, which didn’t stop her from writing about it on occasion).  Instead, it is a superb example of Marsh’s writing at its best — human society and behavior acutely observed and both incisively and empathetically rendered, balancing just the right amounts of humor, scorn and dispassionate analysis, and a crackingly fiendish mystery to go with it all.

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2226305/et-in-arcadia-ego

Patricia Wentworth: The Case Is Closed

Well, this was enjoyable.  As in some of Wentworth’s other books, the mystery wasn’t much to write home about  — the principal villains are known pretty much from the word “go”, as is the way the whole thing was worked (there’s one huge clue fairly early on which essentially gives the game away, and the false alibi is based on a trope that wasn’t even new any longer when the book was first written); it’s also clear that the fact that the guy currently languishing in prison is actually innocent of the crime; and so, too, in the “romance” compartment, it’s being telegraphed literally from page 1 which one is the relationship we’re following.

But at least Miss Silver makes more of an appearance than in book 1 (and she is decidedly more recognizable here as the character we know from later books than in book 1), and you can’t help but love and root for Hilary, the female MC, and her “inner imp”.  (The imp’s poems had me laughing out loud — every single one of them.)  Whatever made Hilary pick Henry, of all people, as her heart’s desire beats me as much as everybody else in this buddy read; though I’ll grant that he redeemed himself ever so slightly towards the end, and with liberal doses of frying pans and Hilary’s imp I do see some hope for him … he’s just got learn to listen to his better / true instincts and not to what he believes others expect him to think and feel, and what therefore must be the “right” (i.e., socially acceptable) response.  (Incidentally, I loved how Diana Bishop in the audio version read the passages from inside Henry’s head with an undeniably ironic subtext, thereby suggesting that Wentworth is mocking him for being the idiot he is.  This worked very well for me.)

Now having read the majority of the books in the series, I can also safely say I’m not a fan of “Wentworth does Gothic”.  This book’s “foggy road” episode was one of the better-executed examples, but I still wish she’d left “young heroine thoughtlessly puts herself in a sinister situation that she can’t control (and which a wiser head would either have avoided or at least not entered alone)” behind at some point.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be; almost every book of the series contains at least one example of this sort of thing.  So, unlike others in the buddy read, I’m not a fan of the “foggy road” episode.  Maybe if this had been the first book by Wentworth I read, I would feel different about it (and as I said, for what it’s worth on its own, it’s comparatively well done).  But as a recurring event in almost every book … thank you, but no.

By and large, though, I enjoyed being back in Miss Silver’s world — I only missed Frank Abbott –, I still love how Wentworth creates characters, and this book is also a marked step up from Gray Mask; less reliant on tropes (even if some are still present), and for once, thankfully also devoid of TSTL females.

As a final side note, I wonder (have been wondering for a while) whether Wentworth ever heard from her contemporary / fellow mystery novelist and great-niece of Tennyson (the poet), F. Tennyson Jesse, on Miss Silver’s unquestioning adoration of “Lord Tennyson”.

(I already finished this book last night, btw, but life intervened earlier today, so I’m only getting around to posting my summary now.)

Reading Status Update: 44%.

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2114261/reading-progress-update-i-ve-read-100

Patricia Wentworth: The Case Is Closed — Reading Progress Update: 44%

Just under the halfway mark, and Miss Silver is being called in AT LAST.  (By the odious Henry and very much against his conviction, not least, which means that the first thing he’ll llikely be in for is having the rug pulled out from under his feet and landing on his bottom.  Good — I hope it will be a hard landing.)  And the person recommending Miss Silver is … our old friend Charles Moray from Grey Mask.  I’m not sure I want him to make another appearance here, either …

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/2112889/reading-progress-update-i-ve-listened-to-44

Clea Koff: The Bone Woman

War Crimes Laid Bare from Beyond the Grave

Some 15+ years ago, towards the end of the years when I was practicing law in the U.S., I was asked to represent a young woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, the former Zaire) in an immigration case.  My client was a Tutsi, in her twenties; a shy, slender young woman with delicate features — I later learned that as in her culture “big is beautiful”, as a result of her persecution- and flight-induced weight loss she considered herself extremely ugly, which substantially negatively impacted her feeling of self-worth, in addition to the trauma she had already suffered as a victim of persecution –, who had come to the U.S. literally owning only the single set of clothes that she wore; including her underwear, which she washed every night.  As she was sitting across from me at a table in the offices of the refugees’ aid society that had taken up her case (and referred the legal aspects to my firm, on a pro bono basis), she told me her story:

Until the 1997 power grab by rebel leader Laurent Kabila, her family had been prosperous; her father was well-connected politically and in the business community.  Once Kabila had seized power, he swiftly instituted an anti-Tutsi campaign similar to that which had ended up in the Rwanda genocide three years earlier; fueled by the fact that thousands of Rwandan Tutsi had actually found refuge in the DRC and were living in camps in the country’s eastern part, though Kabila’s campaign was by far not limited to the east of the DRC.  Tutsi residents of the capital, Kinshasa, like my client’s family, took to hiding in their cellars every night, and sometimes also during the day.  It was no longer safe for them to go out on the streets.  Many lost their jobs; an increasing number of Tutsi were arrested (without warrant) or simply killed.  My client’s father and husband were shot before her very eyes after Kabila’s militia had ransacked their home and found them hiding – she was made to watch them being killed out on the street before being taken to a prison and shut up there, under appalling sanitary conditions and with little food to eat, with other women – a group of 10 or 15 in each cell.  The prison guards used the women for an almost daily game of Russian roulette – the purpose not being a determination which of them were going to be killed next, but which were going to be gang-raped that particular day.

While being transported to a different prison compound some time later, my client took her entire heart into her hands and jumped off the truck.  She managed to get away and for the rest of that day, zigzagged through Kinshasa’s streets until she reached the house of a priest with connections to a refugee group that had organized a secret trail into the neighboring Republic of Congo.  My client was given a new (false) passport – since her real one, even if she’d still had it (which of course she didn’t), would now have been akin to a death warrant – and a plane ticket to the U.S. … where she found out that the very thing that had saved her life (her false passport, which, as instructed, she surrendered immediately upon entering the country) was now also the very thing that stood in the way of her asylum claim, as legally she had entered the U.S. “under false pretenses”, with an assumed identity; if only for the briefest of moments.

This client’s story – apart from its heartrending intrinsic attributes – to me also added a further element of perspective on the work I had been doing for the past several years until then on another case: one pending before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  Because it is one thing to read the witness statements and forensic reports associated with your case, and the summaries of the facts and evidence associated with the cases underlying the ICTY and ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) judgments we were citing as precedents in our briefs.  It is another thing entirely to have one of those eyewitnesses sitting across from you and describing, in a low voice and with downcast eyes, all that she has seen and suffered through herself.  At the time when I took up her case, she had already received a substantial amount of trauma-related and other psychological counseling; it was this counseling that enabled her to tell her story at all – and to do so without bursting into tears every other minute.  Yet, I can honestly say that I have never met a braver person in my entire life, and all these years later, I still feel a tremendous amount of respect for her.

Clea Koff’s The Bone Women has now provided me, some 15+ years after the fact, with yet another bit of perspective on the war crimes investigations underlying the ICTY and ICTR cases that I hadn’t had until then: Insight into just how the forensic reports making victims speak even from the grave had come into being.  I realize that given my own involvement in a case before ICTY, my views on this book probably aren’t the same as those of the vast majority of Koff’s readers, who come to this book without any prior “inside” knowledge.   And while I do think the Telegraph blurb on the cover of my edition of the book (“The ultimate memoir of the post-Cold War decade”) is as vast an overstatement as any blurb can possibly be, I do think this is an important book – as important as many another book about the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo or, for that matter, the Democratic Republic of Congo – or those in Argentina, Chile, Cambodia, (South) Sudan, or anywhere else in the world.  It is also unique, in that it is neither an eyewitness nor a journalist’s account of the atrocities but, rather, the account of a scientist sent into these countries after the fact in order to help establishing the truth which the perpetrators of the genocide had tried to hide – by propaganda just as much as by literally hiding the bodies.

Make no mistake, this is a memoir, not a text on forensic anthropology; so there is a limited amount of scientific detail.  However, I believe Koff was right in drawing the line where she did – anything more would only have invited prurient sensationalism.  And ultimately, I also think to most readers it matters not only to learn about the nature of the forensic anthologists’ work and their findings – e.g., how the graves holding the victims of genocide were identified, how the graves’ parameters were established, how the victims were exhumed, in what general conditions / state of decomposition they were, what kinds of wounds they had sustained (in lay terms) and what conclusions these wounds permitted, what kind of lab work was performed in the morgue, etc.; all of which Koff does cover at considerable length – but also to learn about the background, setup and conditions in which Koff’s missions took place, her and her team’s interactions with the local population and the victims’ relatives and friends, their attitude towards their work (how do you stay sane, confronting the moldering remains of the victims of several of the worst genocides of the recent past every day and learning from their bodies all that you do learn about their final moments, their suffering and their cruel death?), the physical and, particularly, psychological and emotional stress involved in this kind of work, and ultimately Koff’s general take-away from the six missions in which she participated.

One of the things that I most appreciate about Koff’s approach was that however many victims’ bodies she exhumed and examined, she always respected the fact that the individual body she was concerned with at any given time had been a living and breathing person once, and she not only respected their individuality but went to great lengths to highlight how it showed even after death, and how it illustrated the life from which they had prematurely been snatched:

“I kept working, following Bill’s instructions, and exposed the scarf and cranium of a woman on my edge of the grave.  She was lying on her left side, her back to the wall of the grave, and the radiating fractures from a hole on the left side of her head reached around her cranium like fault lines.  […]

I was finding it hard to work in a crouched position because of the heat and the stench: normally I would be alternately standing and crouching, picking and troweling.  But I forgot my discomfort when I found pink necklaces around the skeleton’s neck vertebrae and some hair.  Now I was totally focused.  This woman had been alive once, not so long ago, and had fastened the necklaces herself.  Ralph wondered later if the smaller of the two necklaces would turn out to be a rosary like a plastic one I had found on a surface skeleton.  But as I crouched over this body, I couldn’t know what the pink necklaces had meant to her.”

The Bone Woman, 2005 Random House trade paperback edition, p. 45 (Kibuye)

 * * * * * * * * * *

“After lunch, I started working on my next grave and things became interesting.  Again, there was neither drraza [note: an angular wooden lean-to above the body, keeping the soil away; commonly placed above coffins inside Kosovo graves] nor coffin, neither sheet nor blanket wrapping, just soil on top of a body lying on its back.  The body was clothed in two hooded sweatshirts, a jacket, and tracksuit pants.  The many layers of clothes reminded me first of the Kibuye bodies and then of the Vukovar hospital bodies.” [Note: The many-layered clothing indicated the victims had been on the move when killed and uncertain if and when they would return home or find lasting shelter.]

“[…] A cloudy turquoise marble had turned up in the soil above the body.  I laid it aside in an evidence bag.

[…] The skeleton was that of a young person.  But I wasn’t thinking about children.

[…] Quickly, I leaned over to examine the skull, which I had exposed but not yet detail-cleaned.  I carefully cleaned the soil away from the teeth.  Yes: mandibular canine and second mandibular molar erupting, second maxillary molar still in the crypt.  This person was probably between twelve and fifteen years old when his life ended.

With renewed vigor despite the afternoon heat, I cleared all the dirt until I had just the body lying on the floor of the grave.  I could tell that items were lodged in the dirt-caked right hip pocket of the tracksuit pants.  I didn’t have to expose much more to see that they were marbles.  Lots of them.  A good handful.  Suddenly I was thinking about children.  About how I’d noticed young kids playing what I thought of as the ‘old-fashioned’ game of marbles while the forensic teams had played soccer with the older children from our neighborhood a few weeks earlier.  I had watched these little kids when I left the soccer field for a break (we’d been run ragged).  Two little boys flicked their marbles in grass so long they could barely track the progress.  It was great to see children playing a game outdoors, a game that didn’t involve a television and that was perhaps passed on from parent to kid, from kid to kid.  I was thinking about children, boys especially.  About how they can be so different from young girls, who sometimes stalk their adulthood, wanting to wear training bras even when they have only the hint of breasts, or wanting to wear makeup before their parents will allow it.  Boys can be slower in this race, perhaps surreptitiously checking their reflections in mirrors, looking for the first signs of mustache hair but otherwise trying to get away with juvenile behavior for as long as possible.  The boy in my grave had a pocket full of marbles, and that told me more about his life than almost anything else could.

The marbles didn’t necessarily have evidentiary value for the Tribunal, given that the skeleton with its trauma would tell the story that he was both a child and a noncombatant.  But in the grave with him, I saw beyond the forensic facts to the boy he might have been.  Derek had given me time to clean this boy’s body and clothing […].  I spent the rest of the afternoon with the boy and his marbles.

[…] When we finally carried the boy’s body on the stretcher to the freezer truck, I was reminded of how much I value this part of the process. […] [P]utting a body bag into the reefer for transport to the Tribunal morgue feels like the only quasi-ceremonial step that marks an Unidentified’s formal entry onto the path of becoming an Identified.”

The Bone Woman, 2005 Random House trade paperback edition, pp. 226-229 (Kosovo)

Exhuming the boy with the marbles
(The Bone Woman, 2005 Random House trade paperback edition, unpaginated photo insert p. 14; photo by Ms. Koff’s team mate Justine Michael)

More generally, I also appreciate the fact that Koff’s narrative perspective, in each section of the book, closely mirrors that of her perspective during that particular mission as such.  There is a limited amount of foreshadowing, but by and large, it is easy to see how her own perspective and insight evolved over time (and how she was increasingly able to put into context her very first experience during her mission to Kibuye, Rwanda).  To me, this again makes her book relatable on a personal level (I guess the path she travelled is similar for many people).  But I do also think it may provide an additional, albeit perhaps unspoken, layer of understanding to readers coming to her narrative without any kind of prior knowledge.

In the grand scheme of things, my quibbles with Koff’s book are relatively minor, but not so negligible as to not mention them at all:

As already mentioned in my status update regarding the “Kosovo” section of the book, in the two parts of the narrative dealing with missions where a significant part of Koff’s work took place in a morgue (Kigali and Kosovo), I had less of an immediate feeling of being “right there” with her as in the sections dealing primarily with work assignments at the exhumation sites (Kibuye, Bosnia and Croatia).  Both the Kigali and Kosovo sections made up for this to some extent by the fact that they, too, included at least some amount of “exhumation” narrative, as well as very empathetic descriptions of Koff’s interactions with surviving victims and the relatives of the murdered.  Still – and possibly this may be because a substantial part of morgue work is pathologist, not anthropologist work – the overall sense I have gained of the work processes inside the morgue, and the way in which the anthropologists’ and the pathologists’ work fused into one whole piece is less precise and acute than my sense of the anthropologists’ work involving the graves as such.  (The Kigali section of the book feels a bit chopped apart anyway; it’s as if it originally had been longer, but had been curtailed as a result of an editor’s intervention.)

I also think in her final remarks and her general take-away from her missions, Koff underestimates the role that racism played in the genocides she investigated.  She is right, of course, in pointing out that there are almost always other motives at play as well, and indeed may be the true reason why the racism card is played: The Nazi “Lebensraum im Osten” (“settlement” or “living space in the East”) campaign, which to Germans justified the slaughter of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and of course Jews even above and beyond the lie that it had been the Poles who had started WWII was, in fact, nothing but a naked territorial and economic power grab, justified by the alleged inferiority of “the Slavic races”.  In more recent times, politicians from Trump to Orbán to the Brexiters and the Austrian and German right-wing extremists haven been – and are – stoking the flames of racism to achieve everything from their own, personal financial gain to unbridled political power (and more often than not, a combination of the two).  So yes, those who incite xenophobia and racial hatred will often, and almost invariably, be motivated by something entirely different – there is a reason, after all, why corruption and autocrat regimes go hand in hand.

But the fear of, and the need to defeat “the other” is a powerful motivator in anybody who feels threatened or belittled (however unjustifiedly); and demagogues have known since time immemorial that nothing ensures their success as quickly, easily and decidedly as tapping into and activating that fear.  The Balkans in particular have been a powder keg of racial, ethnic and religious hatred at least since the 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje (probably even longer, but for our purposes let’s just go along with the moment in history that one of the key parties, the Serbs, themselves pin down as the origin of it all).  Serbian leaders and activists have, ever since then, again and again pointedly chosen the anniversary of that battle for any purpose in the book, unleashing Serbian racial and religious resentment against the enemy of the moment (Ottomans / Turks, the Austrian empire, Bosnians, Albanians and Croats, you name it) to achieve their aims.  The Croats, to give them their “due”, haven’t been any better – in WWII, the Croat Ustaša movement was a staunch ally of Hitler and the Nazis.  Tito managed to keep the powder in the keg in post-WWII Yugoslavia by centralizing government, and by essentially replacing ethnic allegiance and identification with an enforced allegiance to a seemingly unified Yugoslavian state, combined with economic incentives.  But inside the keg, resentment had been brewing all the time, and the lid flew off with a bang after Tito had died and the Warsaw Pact had collapsed, along with the Soviet Union as the world had known it (even though Yugoslavia hadn’t even been a member of the Warsaw Pact).  Not having been able to prevent the break-off of economically prosperous Slovenia, the Yugoslav leaders resorted to the Balkans’ time-honored tradition in their reaction to the “defection” of Croatia (almost equally prosperous as Slovenia) and Bosnia: “Serbs, go get ‘em, those traitorous Ustaša and Muslim bastards who are destroying our sacred and beloved Yugoslavia (and, um, cough, Serbia).”  The next thing the world knew, former neighbors were at each others’ throats with a vengeance, tens and hundreds of thousands of people were driven out of their homes and murdered, solely on the basis of their ethnicity and religion – and everybody else, from the rest of Europe to the U.N., NATO and the entire world was staring at the Balkans in absolute horror.  The Dayton Peace Accord, which eventually brought the violence in Croatia and Bosnia to an end, placed ethnic and religious reconciliation at a premium for a reason – and so do peacekeeping missions to any other part of the world where racism is one of the driving forces of the conflict.

Still and all: This is an important book – and now more than ever, timely and highly recommended reading.

Final note: I already finished this book a week ago, but I needed some time to organize my thoughts — and this is one book for which I did want to write a review by all means; not only because it was a buddy read with Elentarri and Ani.

 

Comments on the Book’s Individual Sections:

Kibuye: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-1-kibuye-rwanda/
Kigali: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-2-kigali-rwanda/
Bosnia: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-3-bosnia/
Croatia: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-4-croatia/
Kosovo: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-5-kosovo/

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1888482/war-crimes-laid-bare-from-beyond-the-grave

Clea Koff: The Bone Woman — Part 5: Kosovo

Reading progress update: 256 of 277 pages.

The airport of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is called Kosovo Polje — roughly translated, “blackbird field” (“kos” is blackbird in Serbo-Croat).  Kosovo Polje is also the name of the battle (and battlefield) which, in 1389, opened the door for the Ottoman conquest of large chunks of the southern Balkans.  Although the Serbian Empire had already crumbled of its own accord almost 20 years earlier, in 1371 (and although both armies were decimated in the 1389 battle; the difference being that the Serb forces didn’t have any reinforcements, whereas the Ottomans did), it is this battle which, to the present day, forms the cornerstone of Serbian nationalism.  Serbian leaders and activists, even centuries later, again and again timed important events to take place on the anniversary of the battle (declarations of war, crucial battles and conquests within a war, important speeches, etc.) — not least among these, the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist; the event that kicked off World War I.

When Koff went to Kosovo in 2000, they couldn’t fly into Kosovo Polje airport — it was war-damaged and closed.  Although the Dayton Peace Process had, by that time, returned Bosnia and Croatia to the path towards peace, stability, justice and reconciliation, Slobodan Milošević and his cronies still weren’t done.  Having lost their grip on Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina, they turned their attention with ever greater force to Kosovo; after WWII an autonomous region within Serbia, but largely inhabited by Albanians (who for the most part, like the majority of Bosnians, are Muslims — whereas the majority of Serbs are Orthodox Christians).  Tensions rose as Kosovo was stripped off its autonomous status, there was retaliatory violence by the radical Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) — which, make no mistake, wasn’t any better than any of the other armed players of the 1990s’ Balkan wars –, and the Serbs rejected a peace plan that would have restored Kosovo’s autonomous status.  Eventually, it took NATO bombardment for the Yugoslav and Serb forces to withdraw; however, even that didn’t put an immediate end to the violence and ethnic cleansing on the ground (again, both by and against Serbs and Kosovo Albanians, though again, too, the Serbs took the cake).  In June 1999, Kosovo was at last placed under temporary international administration, and Milošević was indicted by the ICTY Office of the Prosecutor; originally for the events in Kosovo, with indictments for Croatia and Bosnia following later.

A few takeaways from the “Kosovo” section of Koff’s book, before I move on to the ICTY side of things:

* By this time, Koff had come a long way from the grad student who, four years earlier, had just been happy to be doing what she’d always dreamed of and what she believed was right.  Like most everybody else involved in international humanitarian missions, Koff in 2000 had realized that there’s no quick fix for bringing a country from war back to lasting peace and reconciliation.  Collecting the evidence of war crimes and prosecuting the perpetrators is an important, but only one building block within that process.

* She’d also learned that law enforcement works in circles (or rather, spirals): Once dedicated criminals have learned where they are vulnerable, they’re not just going to stop their criminal activity — rather, they’ll just up the ante (and force law enforcement agencies to follow suit in turn in order to be able to stay on their tracks).  This is true for hackers, troll farms and other cybercriminals just as much as it is for war criminals, who — once they had clued into the fact that buried bodies may be unburied and used as evidence — in the final years of the 1990s simply started burning them, or disinterred them and reburied them hundreds of kilometers / miles from the combat zone, in territory under their own control.  (Which in turn, however, of course, still doesn’t do away with the eye witness accounts of the murders.  And in a genocide, there will always be bodies that are left behind to be found by investigators, just because of the sheer magnitude of this “crime of crimes” (not my term but that used by an ICTY judge in one judgment, IIRC in connection with Srebrenica)).

* The U.N., in turn, had also learned a few lessons from operations on the ground in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia, and was now finally giving their people some training at the start of the mission; most importantly, in connection with antipersonnel mines, as well as interactions with the local population and the — albeit as it turned out, for Koff only theoretical — prospect of a (much-needed) psychological debriefing.  (If they were also trained in hostage situation behaviour, she doesn’t say as much — maybe it took yet another few years for that to become the standard it now is, too.)  (On a personal note, the walkie-talkie goof exchanges — “hey, what are you guys having for dinner?” — sound familiar, too.)  More importantly, the psychological training Koff now finally received enabled her to put her own experience, which probably included at least one or even two severe burn-outs, into perspective and understand what exactly had been happening to her.

* In terms of gaining a larger perspective on her current mission, she had also come full circle from Rwanda: Whereas there, that wider perspective had resulted from the small size of her team (thus making for a greater scope of responsibility for every team member) and from the limited resources (requiring a high degree of cooperation and discipline), in Kosovo her ability to see beyond the day-to-day realities of her own role was fostered by having assumed managerial duties and thus, having gained more of a bird’s eye view — of an operation much larger and, despite some bureaucratic snafus, much more professionally organized than those in Rwanda.

* Yet, although this final section is almost as long as the first one (Kibuye), I’m getting much less of a precise sense of what her job consisted (other than snippets here and there, like preparing orthodontical charts and helping with the exhumations in the graveyeards in the first two weeks).  I don’t know to what extent this is due to the work routine in a morgue and the numerous procedures coming together there — or due to the fact that a substantial amount of the work in the morgue(s) was done by pathologists, not forensic anthropologists –; in any event, I had the same feeling after the section about Kigali (where part of her job was likewise morgue-related).  In the other sections, I learned a lot about the way bodies are located and positioned in a grave, how they are exhumed, and where the challenges of this work are.  I also learned (in all parts of the book, including Kosovo) about her teams’ interactions with the victims’ families and friends, those families’ and friends’ responses to their loss and to the work done by the forensic experts, and the challenges in identifying the victims (as well as the way in which these challenges could be overcome — and the limitations that circumstances imposed on all that).  In the Kibuye, Bosnia and Croatia sections in particular, I was right there with Koff on the ground, in the graves, establishing the graves’ parameters, clearing away back dirt, exhuming bodies (though I will say my mind refrained from going down the “partly decomposed / maggot-riddled” road), and examining bullet wounds and the effect of blunt force trauma and machete cuts on the bodies / skeletons found.  In the majority of both the Kigali and Kosovo sections, however, I felt at a much greater distance from the actual work processes — there, I was closest to her narrative when she was talking about her encounters with the victims’ families and other survivors of the massacres. By and large this didn’t get too substantially in the way of my overall assessment of the book, but if there’s one thing that niggles, it is this (and Koff’s concluding remarks on the origins of the conflicts — I have actually finished the book in the interim, but I’ve decided to reserve my comments on this part for my final review).

Now, on to the ICTY side:

Those indicted for war crimes in Kosovo were on the Serbian side:

* Slobodan Milošević,
* Vlastimir Đorđević, as well as
* Nebojša Pavković, Milan Milutinović, Nikola Šainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić, Nebojša Pavković, Vladimir Lazarević and Sreten Lukić

— and on the Kosovo Albanian side:

* Fatmir Limaj, Isak Musliu and Haradin Bala.

 

Slobodan Milošević
According to the case information sheet, his indictment included, with regard to Kosovo:

• The forced deportation of approximately 800,000 Kosovo Albanian civilians; to facilitate these expulsions and displacements, forces of the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and Serbia deliberately created an atmosphere of fear and oppression through the use of force, threats of force, and acts of violence.

• The murder of hundreds of Kosovo Albanian civilians – men, women and children, which occurred in a widespread or systematic manner throughout the province of Kosovo.

• Sexual assaults carried out by forces of the FRY and Serbia against Kosovo Albanians, in particular women.

• A systematic campaign of destruction of property owned by Kosovo Albanian civilians accomplished by the widespread shelling of towns and villages; the burning and destruction of property, including homes, farms, businesses, cultural monuments and religious sites; as a result of these orchestrated actions, villages, towns, and entire regions were rendered uninhabitable for Kosovo Albanians

And as we’ve seen with regard to Bosnia and Croatia, that was just for starters.

 

Vlastimir Đorđević
Assistant Minister of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministarstvo unutrašnjih poslova or MUP) and Chief of the Public Security Department (RJB) of the MUP responsible for all unitsand personnel of the RJB in Serbia, including Kosovo.  For orchestrating the ethnical cleansing and genocide of Kosovo Albanians, as well as the mass rape of Kosovo Albanian women, sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment in the appeals judgment of January 27, 2014 (down from 27 years as ordered in the February 23, 2011 trial judgment; the appeals chamber found fault with some of the trial chamber’s determinations particularly in regard to ethnical cleansing / forced deportations).

No less than 55 pages of the judgment against Đorđević — which (not counting a “confidential annex”) is a total of 970 pages long — cover the evaluation of the forensic evidence regarding the bodies discovered in the various grave sites, not a small part of which bodies had been disinterred and moved all the way to Serbia in an effort of concealment.  Of these 55 pages, the initial 3, as well as several pages in the individual sections, are concerned with establishing the credibility of the report(s) prepared by Eric Baccard, the chief pathologist of the Office for Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) team to which Koff belonged. In addition to OMPF, there were also various other national and international teams conducting the same sort of work — British, French, American, Danish, etc. (one of the British teams was headed by Val McDermid’s friend Dr. Sue Black, whom we “met” in Forensics, and whose ICTY-related experience reportedly forms the basis of McDermid’s Skeleton Road) — and as Baccard had been retained to also conduct an examination of the various national teams’ approaches, so as to ensure the reliability and comparability of their findings, his report covered more than the work of the OMPF team.  This, and the fact that Koff isn’t specific as to which grave sites she worked on — or respectively, from which grave sites originated the bodies which they examined in the Orahovac morgue — makes it a bit difficult to pin down which of the evidentiary findings in the judgment may be related to her work specifically.  Based on the dates of her missions (April / May and July 2000), I can’t find anything in the judgment’s section on the Baccard report that would match — even though Koff’s particular friend, the team’s chief anthropologist José Pablo Baraybar, also testified; yet, the OMPF-related section of the judgment refers exclusively to mass graves discovered and exhumed only in 2001.

 

Nebojša Pavković, Milan Milutinović, Nikola Šainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić, Nebojša Pavković, Vladimir Lazarević and Sreten Lukić
* Nebojša Pavković (Commander of the Third Army of the Yugoslav Army (Vojska Jugoslavije or VJ)), sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment in the appeals judgment of January 23, 2014.

* Sreten Lukić (Head of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs — Ministarstvo unutrašnjih poslova or MUP — staff for Kosovo & Metohija), sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in the appeals judgment of January 23, 2014.

* Nikola Šainović (Deputy Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)), sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment in the appeals judgment of January 23, 2014.
* Dragoljub Ojdanić (Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army (VJ)), sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in the trial judgment of February 26, 2009 (sentence was not appealed).
* Vladimir Lazarević (Commander of the Priština Corps of the VJ), sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment in the appeals judgment of January 23, 2014.

* Milan Milutinović (President of the Republic of Serbia), acquitted.

The charges against these men were essentially the same as against Đorđević (see above).  Though the February 26, 2009 trial judgment comprises three volumes and a total of almost 1,500 pages and, again, goes into great detail as to the nature of the forensic evidence (including the expert reports and testimony of Eric Baccard and José Pablo Baraybar), again I can’t find any gave / exhumation sites that specifically seem to match up with any exhumations that Koff might have been involved with — I really wish she had been more specific where the bodies she worked on had been found.

 

Fatmir Limaj, Isak Musliu and Haradin Bala
* Haradin Bala (Guard at the KLA Lapušnik / Llapushnik prison camp; participated in the torture of at least 4 and the murder of 9 prisoners), sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment by the appeals judgment of September 27, 2007.
* Fatmir Limaj and
* Isak Musliu
(both allegedly KLA commanders in the Lapušnik / Llapushnik area and responsible for the prison camp there) were acquitted, after their participation in any crimes could not be proven with the requisite amount of certainty.  Probably successful campaigns of witness intimidation were at least partically responsible for this outcome.

I can’t find any indications that Clea Koff was part of the forensic team that provided evidence for this prosecution, though José Pablo Baraybar testified as to the cause of death of the murdered prisoners.  The trial chamber did not dispute his findings; rather, again, the difficulties were in tying the deaths to the accused.

If I’m not missing anything, every other Kosovo Albanian politician and KLA officer / member indicted by ICTY was also acquitted, for one reason or another.  The ICTY trial and appeals chambers obviously had their reasons for these dispositions, and by and large, it is probably true that the Serbs committed the largest amount of war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.  Still, I remember that a lot of Serbs considered ICTY biased against them, and statistics such as the above would doubtlessly have fueled those flames.

 

Overall Review and Comments on the Book’s Other Sections:

Kibuye: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-1-kibuye-rwanda/
Kigali: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-2-kigali-rwanda/
Bosnia: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-3-bosnia/
Croatia: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-4-croatia/
Overall Review: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/20/clea-koff-the-bone-woman/

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1885738/reading-progress-update-i-ve-read-256-out-of-277-pages

Clea Koff: The Bone Woman — Part 4: Croatia

Reading progress update: 194 of 277 pages.

Vukovar and Eastern Slavonia: a notorious bone of contention between Croats and Serbs, and a necessary reminder that:

1)  The Serbs weren’t the only ones to commit war crimes, drive out their neighbours or profit from ethnic cleansing.  All sides to the conflict had blood on their hands.  All sides profited from the misfortune of their former neighbours.  And it wasn’t only the militia, the para(militarie)s and other forms of organized thugs.  Almost everybody did, to one extent or another — and those who didn’t, more often than not fell into the “there but for the grace of God” category. — Several centuries went by until the inhabitants of Rome started using bricks and stones from the ruins left behind by the Ancient Romans to build new houses (some of them, right inside the Colisseum).  But only days, weeks, at most months went by until one Croat lady concluded her ethnically cleansed Serb neighbours weren’t going to come back, and decided to start dismantling their home and use it as a brickyard supplying the necessary building material to repair her own war-damaged house.  Nothing says “these people are over and done with” quite like dismantling their buildings and using the bricks to build something else.

2)  Opposition to fact-finding such as done by forensic anthropologists and (ultimately) court proceedings is not only fueled by loyalty to the perpetrators and their elevation to “national hero” status.  Removing doubt as to a missing person’s fate also removes the hope that his loved ones have been clinging to with all their might, that he might still be alive — the very hope that had allowed them to go on living; living, that is, for the day when the missing will at last be returned to them alive.  This is made even worse in the face of propaganda and lies denying that the massacre after which they had disappeared never took place at all, and claiming that stories about that massacre were all just lies by “the other side”, whoever that may be at any given time.  (If you thought “fake news” claims were a recent thing, think again.)  To the friends and relatives of a missing person, nothing can possibly be crueler than proof that their missing loved one is, in fact, dead — and died a barbaric death, to boot.  And yet, it is important for that proof to come out: not only because it pulls out the rug from under the propaganda denying the massacre in the first place, but also because it allows those left behind to begin the process of grieving and, eventually, healing (after a fashion) — and possibly also demanding justice, though many will simply want to walk away from it all.  Which is totally fine and must be respected in all events.

As an aside, I’m happy to find that Koff and I share a personal heroine, though unlike me, Koff has actually been fortunate enough to meet her in person: Louise Arbour, from 1996 to 1999 ICTY’s Chief Prosecutor (succeeding Richard Goldstone, who right now, incidentally, is on the Board of Directors of Physicians for Human Rights), and later, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Notwithstanding my first cautionary note above, though, it was again Serbs who were behind the massacre at Ovčara, where the patients from Vukovar hospital had been taken and killed.

The accused who stood trial for these events were:

* Slobodan Milošević,
* Mile Mrkšić, Veselin Šljivančanin and Miroslav Radić, and
* Slavko Dokmanović.

 

Slobodan Milošević
According to the ICTY case information sheet, with regard to the war in Croatia Milošević stood accused of:

• The extermination or murder of hundreds of Croat and other non-Serb civilians, including women and elderly persons, in Dalj, Erdut, Klisa, Lovas, Vukovar, Voćin, Baćin, Saborsko and neighbouring villages, Škabrnja, Nadin, Bruska, and Dubrovnik and its environs.

• The prolonged and routine imprisonment and confinement of thousands of Croat and other non-Serb civilians in detention facilities within and outside of Croatia, including prison camps located in Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• The establishment and perpetuation of inhumane living conditions for Croat and other non-Serb civilian detainees within the above-mentioned detention facilities.

• The deportation or forcible transfer of at least 170,000 Croat and other non-Serb civilians from the territories specified above, including the deportation to Serbia of at least 5,000 inhabitants from Ilok and 20,000 inhabitants from Vukovar; and the forcible transfer to locations within Croatia of at least 2,500 inhabitants from Erdut.

• The deliberate destruction of homes, other public and private property, cultural institutions, historic monuments and sacred sites of the Croat and other non-Serb population in Dubrovnik and its environs, Vukovar, Erdut, Lovas, Šarengrad, Bapska, Tovarnik, Voćin, Saborsko, Škabrnja, Nadin, and Bruška.

• The repeated torture, beatings and killings of Croat and other non-Serb civilian detainees in the above-mentioned detention facilities.

• Unlawful attacks on Dubrovnik and undefended Croat villages throughout the territories specified above.

There may not have been an official final determination as to whether or not he committed suicide, but personally I am convinced that yes, he did.  Rather than face the prospect of spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement in a high security prison cell (saddled with a heart condition), which — short solitary walks in the prison yard excepted — he knew he would only ever leave again feet first, I believe that when he started to realize there was no chance that he would not end up being convicted, he decided to take the coward’s way out and short-cut to “feet first” immediately.  Either way, however, the world is well rid of him.

 

Mile Mrkšić, Veselin Šljivančanin and Miroslav Radić
The men chiefly held responsible for the events at Vukovar Hospital and the Ovčara massacre:

* Mile Mrkšić (Colonel in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and commander of the 1st Guards Motorised Brigade and Operational Group South, the JNA unit operative in the Vukovar area), sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in the September 27, 2007 trial judgment, confirmed by the appeals judgment of May 5, 2009.

* Veselin Šljivančanin (Major in the JNA; security officer of the 1st Guards Motorised Brigade and Operational Group South in charge of a military police battalion subordinated to the 1st Guards Motorised Brigade), sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in the sentencing appeals judgment of December 8, 2010 (his sentence in the trial judgment had been 5 years; on the prosecution’s appeal, the Appeals Chamber had initially bumped it up to 17 years but then reduced it again on the basis of new evidence that had come to light before the appeals judgment had become final).

* Miroslav Radić (Captain in the JNA; commanded an infantry company in the 1st Battalion of the 1st Guards Motorised Brigade), acquitted in the trial judgment of September 27, 2007.

This trial highlighted, once more, one of the key problems that ICTY faced:  Unlike in Rwanda, where virtually all the accused and all the crimes committed could be tied to the Hutu Power movement and its orchestrated “final solution” to exterminate the Tutsi, in the former Yugoslavia you had a plethora of major players, who very often didn’t even agree with each other (let alone act in concert) when they were “nominally” on the same side.  This is particularly true for the role played by the regular military (Yugoslav People’s Army, Croatian Army, etc.) vis-à-vis that of the militia, paramilitary units and other “irregular” (and highly extremist) forces.  Which obviously isn’t to say that any of these people, including the regular military, were anything even remotely approaching angels or saints, but even when it was clear that a war crime had been committed, in the ICTY proceedings it was vastly more difficult than in Rwanda to pin down who exactly was responsible for the crime and in what way; especially if there were no surviving direct eye witnesses, or the witnesses were confused about the uniforms they had seen (those of the paras were very similar to “real” army uniforms, which easily led to misidentifications, especially at night), or the indictment attached greater “command responsibility” to an officer than he actually had had.  And unlike in Srebrenica, where there were so many massacres that, if you were an officer of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb Army (which operated in the area at the time), some of your actions would almost be guaranteed to constitue the commission of a war crime, with regard to Vukovar Hospital, there was “only” the massacre at Ovčara: You were either going to get nailed for that, or not at all.

Here, the prosecution’s case against Mrkšić (the area’s commanding regular JNA army officer, who had ordered the removal of the Vukovar Hospital patients: originally they were intended to be sent to a location under JNA control, but ultimately they ended up in Ovčara) had rested substantially on the contention that he had “command responsibility” for (i.e., was in a position of command over, and therefore criminally liable for the actions of) the Serbian paramilitaries which actually carried out the massacre at Ovčara; and that he had in fact handed over the patients to the paramilitary units, intending for the subsequent massacre to happen.  However, the Trial Chamber found that while he was to be faulted for having withdrawn the protection of the regular army (JNA) from the prisoners taken at the hospital by ordering his JNA troops to withdraw from Ovčara, he neither intended nor ordered the massacre as such.  (The Trial Chamber also seems to have doubted whether the paras would ever have listened to any orders he’d have tried to give them, i.e. whether he had factual command responsibility over the paras; even though it found that de jure — legally / in theory — command responsibility over them was vested in him.)  As a result, he was convicted of aiding and abetting the massacre — but not of participating in it or ordering it.  This still resulted in a 20-year prison term, but not in the much longer (up to lifetime, or de facto lifetime) sentence that would have resulted from a conviction for directly participating in or ordering the massacre.

The same, on a somewhat reduced level, was true for Mrkšić’s co-defendant Šljivančanin, the former security officer of his brigade: He was instrumental in the removal of the patients from the hospital and, later, in the withdrawal of the regular JNA forces from Ovčara, which earned him — after some back and forth — a 10-year prison sentence, but not the sentence he might have received if he had been found guilty of a more direct involvement

The third defendant, Radić, finally, was acquitted entirely: He had been present at the hospital, but there was no evidence that he was also present at Ovčara; let alone, that he participated in the removal of the patients with any foreknowledge of what was going to happen later (or that he had any reason to believe any of his JNA subordinates were going to participate in the massacare) — recall, the patients were initially supposed to be taken to an entirely different location, where (unlike at Ovčara) they would have remained under the control of the JNA.  This was all he was shown to have known.

(You might wonder, incidentally, why the prosecution did not, after the outcome of the Mrkšić trial, proceed to indicting the commanders of the paramilitary units who had actually ordered the massacre.  I’m wondering about that as well — all I can speculate is that by this time, 15+ years after the events, the trail had literally gone cold; and until then, the prosecution had obviously been banking entirely on getting Mrkšić convicted for giving the fatal order.  Which was a miscalculation that not only failed at trial but also on appeal.)

The Mrkšić trial judgment is also notable with regard to the broad space it accords to the forensic evidence regarding the massacre as such, the fact that it occurred under the supervision of the Yugoslav and Croatian governments as well as those of several international organizations,  and the process of the identification of the witnesses: Quite obviously, the Trial Chamber was aware of the importance which the forensic evidence was going have in the public perception of the events, after the Yugoslav and Serb propaganda had vigorously denied that a massacre had ever happened at all, and after the victims’ relatives — organized under the name “The Mothers of Vukovar” — had initially opposed the exhumation, believing the propaganda and clinging to the hope that some day they would see their missed loved ones alive again:

“The exhumation of the mass grave began on 31 August 1996. Bodies were retrieved from the site and transported to Zagreb where full post mortem examinations was conducted.  The exhumation and the autopsies were conducted by international and domestic experts. Representatives of the Croatian and the Yugoslav government were present during the exhumation and the autopsies. The exhumation was conducted under the authority of this Tribunal. Other international organisations, including ECMM, OSCE, and the International Commission for Missing People also participated in the exhumation.

Once the bodies were exhumed, they were transferred to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Zagreb. International forensic experts carried out the autopsies of the bodies under the monitoring of Dr Davor Strinović, Deputy Head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Croatia and a member of the Republic of Croatia Government Commission for Detainees and Missing Persons (“Commission for Missing Persons”). The primary task of the international experts was to determine the cause of death in each case. They carried out the autopsies according to applicable Croatian requirements and in accordance with international standards and described all their findings, including findings that may not have been linked directly to the cause of death but may have had relevance to the process of identification. Exhibit 458, tendered through Dr Strinović, is a table prepared by the international forensic experts providing a summary of the findings of their examinations of the bodies exhumed at the Ovčara mass grave. The chart includes findings on cause and manner of death. Exhibit 462 contains the autopsy reports.

The remains of 200 human bodies were exhumed from this mass grave at Ovčara. There were 198 males and two females. The age range of those exhumed was between 16 and 72. The cause of death was established in 195 cases. 188 individuals died of gunshot wounds or multiple gunshot wounds. For the seven other persons the cause of death was trauma. It was established during the post mortem examinations that 86 individuals had also suffered from wounds or injuries caused before death. For the remaining 114 persons the autopsy reports contained no entries indicating that these persons had visible signs of trauma or injuries caused before death. The Chamber accepts in accordance with this evidence that at least 200 persons had been buried in the mass grave, that 195 of these persons died from trauma, including 188 from gunshot wounds, and that 86 of these persons also suffered bodily injuries caused before death. The Chamber’s finds from the evidence that the 200 persons had been killed at the mass grave site on 20/21 November 1991. The death of more persons than the 200 mentioned above at Ovčara on 20/21 November 1991 is not precluded by these findings, although, apart from a few specific cases identified later in this judgement, this is not established by the evidence in this case.

The cause of death could not be established by autopsy in the case of five of the 200 bodies buried in the mass grave. The Chamber accepts Dr Strinović’s evidence that in cases where gunshots have not damaged the bones but only soft tissue of a body, such as the heart, an autopsy performed several years after the death will not reveal the cause of death as the soft tissue will have decomposed. Given the surrounding circumstances, as found by the Chamber from all the evidence, the presence of 200 bodies in the one grave, of whom it is demonstrated by autopsy findings that 195 died from trauma including 188 from gunshot wounds, the Chamber finds by inference that all 200 persons buried in the grave died on 20/21 November 1991 at Ovčara from trauma caused by physical violence, in almost all cases from one or more gunshot wounds, and further, in the case of each of the five persons whose cause of death could not be determined by autopsy examination, that the trauma causing death was most probably gunshot wound to the soft tissue of the body.

After the autopsies were completed, the process of identification began. In 1997, the Commission for Missing Persons took custody of the bodies exhumed at the Ovčara mass grave in order to carry out this task. Two methods of identification were used: the classical method and the DNA method. Classical identification was conducted by gathering of identifying elements through autopsy and ante mortem material, including clothing, any items found on a body including jewellery, documents, and keys, as well as the teeth and skin in appropriate cases. The skin of each body was examined for identifying elements including any scars from previous surgery, injuries, old injuries, scar tissue, and tattoos. Ante mortem information was gathered from the families of the victims and then compared with elements found in the course of the autopsy. Of the 200 bodies exhumed at Ovčara, 192 were identified, 93 by the classical method and 99 by DNA. Of those identified almost all were of Croatian ethnicity. Even where an identification had been established by these means the identification was not accepted as final unless confirmed by the family of the victim. Each body remained classified as unidentified until final confirmation was obtained.

The Annex to the Indictment lists the names of 264 individuals who are alleged to have been taken from the Vukovar hospital and murdered near Ovčara during the evening hours of 20/21 November 1991. Of these 264 named individuals, the bodies of 190 have been identified as described and were among those exhumed from the mass grave at Ovčara. Other evidence further established that another 16 of those listed in the Annex to the Indictment were found in other graves and were subsequently identified. 13 of those 16 were exhumed from the New Cemetery in Vukovar, one person from the Lovas mass grave, and the mortal remains of another two of those listed in the Annex were received from the authorities of Serbia and Montenegro (from Sremska Mitrovica in 1997 and from Belgrade in 1995, respectively). The bodies of 58 persons listed in the Annex to the Indictment have not been found and they remain reported as missing. No evidence was led during the trial concerning the cause of death of the 16 persons listed in the Annex to the Indictment but whose remains were found elsewhere than at Ovčara, so that the evidence does not establish that these persons were murdered or when they died.

Of those 190 persons listed in the Annex to the Indictment whose bodies have been identified and were exhumed from the mass grave at Ovčara, in 184 cases the cause of death was shown by autopsy to have been gunshot wound or multiple gunshot wounds. The cause of death of two more of these persons was trauma. The cause of death of the remaining four persons was not able to be determined by autopsy but, in accordance with the finding of the Chamber noted a little earlier in this Judgement, in each case the cause of death was trauma, occurring on 20/21 November 1991 at Ovčara, the trauma being most probably a gunshot wound to the soft tissue of the body.”

Case No. IT-95-13/1, Prosecutor v. Mrkšić et al., Judgment of September 27, 2007, paras. 492-498.

[After this follows a five page-long section detailing how exactly the victims had been identified, and why the evidence of their identification is credible and convincing in the Trial Chamber’s view.]  Then the Trial Chamber concludes:

“Thus, the Chamber is satisfied and finds that 194 of the persons named in the Annex to the Indictment were taken from Vukovar hospital in the morning of 20 November 1991 and were murdered in the evening and night hours of 20/21 November 1991 at Ov

The evidence further demonstrates, in the finding of the Chamber, that at the time of these 194 killings, the perpetrators acted with the requisite intent for murder. The circumstances demonstrate this. The Chamber refers in particular to the very large number of victims and to the fact that almost all victims died from multiple gunshot wounds. The Chamber also refers here to its findings made elsewhere in the Judgement, that a large grave had been dug before the killings, that the grave was in an isolated location, that the bodies of at least 190 of the victims were covered and left, and that the killings occurred in the evening and at night. To establish the intent of the actual perpetrators it is further relevant that the victims were prisoners of war, that they were unarmed, the majority also being sick or wounded patients from a hospital. The Chamber would also observe here that the perpetrators were among the victors in a bitter armed conflict in which the victims had been among the Croat losers.

On the basis of the foregoing, and leaving aside for the present the question of the criminal responsibility of the three Accused, the Chamber finds that the elements of the offence of murder (Count 4) are established in relation to 194 identified persons listed in the Schedule to the Judgement.”

Case No. IT-95-13/1, Prosecutor v. Mrkšić et al., Judgment of September 27, 2007, paras. 509-511.

It’s almost as if the Trial Chamber were telling the prosecution in that last paragraph of the quoted excerpt, “and if you idiots hadn’t focused exclusively on the regular army officers although you knew the massacre had been committed by paramilitaries after the JNA unit had withdrawn, we might actually have been able to convict someone of having committed these murders, too …”

 

Finally, there was:

Slavko Dokmanović
Dokmanović was the President of the Vukovar municipality at the time of the Ovčara massacre.  He likewise stood accused of having either participated in it or at least aided and abetted in its commission.  However, the proceedings against him came to a halt after he had hanged himself in his cell in June 1998.

 

Overall Review and Comments on the Book’s Other Sections:

Kibuye: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/07/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-1-kibuye-rwanda/
Kigali: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-2-kigali-rwanda/
Bosnia: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-3-bosnia/
Kosovo: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/clea-koff-the-bone-woman-part-5-kosovo/
Overall Review: https://themisathena.wordpress.com/2019/05/20/clea-koff-the-bone-woman/

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1884395/reading-progress-update-i-ve-read-194-out-of-277-pages